Idea and Innovation Blog

People regularly ask me about the benefits of automating Innovation Management. Many don’t just ask, but argue that Innovation Management “must” be automated.

How can you automatically create value?

• Is there more financial value to a sculpture that was hand-crafted by an artist or one shaped in a mold and cooked in an oven?
• Is there more financial value to going to a 5-star restaurant with a dress code or getting a sandwich from a vending machine?
• Is there more value from a personal financial advisor or with applying for credit online?
• Is there more value from going in an antique shop to see and touch the goods or shopping online from an auction site that shows pictures?
• Would you prefer to go see a hair dresser for $50 or would you actually agree to sit in an “automated” barber machine get their hair cut for simply $5?
• Would you prefer to cook yourself a meal or eat a frozen dinner?

When you automate something you *think* that you are making things easier. But the actual goal of automation is to be able to perform mass-execution and mass-production through an optimized and measured, repeatable execution plan. Ford did not create the first assembly line so that he could deliver better cars – the goal was to cut costs. By automating the process he only had to train staff on doing a portion of the process, and repeat this step for several hours until end-of-day. Were cars better? That is a subject that one could debate for a long time. I’m sure that when you are trained to install one part and repeat the process 10,000 times during the day you should become an expert at it, but if that is the case then why do cars still break down – why do warranties even exist? The argument of automation bringing quality after 100 years of learning should have given us a process that produces perfection by now.

The reason is that, automation (even today) does not produce perfection – it is clear that it has instead *lowered quality* for manufactured goods. The result of automation is therefore *not* to produce better goods but to *reduce costs* by using “identical” repetition. Even today, the value is in the aesthetic design qualities and brilliance of engineering IP; the automation component is repetitive execution.

Ford produced identical cars down to the color. They knew exactly how much money it cost to make one – the variables were completely known even before they started the first car every morning. If they did not have X number of bolts in their boxes, the workers knew that there was going to be a problem at around a certain time during the day (they could even guess at what time).

Today people suggest automated workflows for Idea Management. Parts of this make sense; the majority however, doesn’t.

We have already established the following about a process:

• The goal is to produce identical things
• The goal is to lower costs by repeating actions
• The outcome will be of lesser quality and therefore far from perfection
• Participants will not understand the whole process, therefore can’t bring value to it

So the next time that you think about a great new concept that will Lower Costs, Increase Revenues, Open new Markets, Bring in New Client – don’t think that the solution will be as easy a throwing a frozen dinner in the microwave and hitting Preset-1 – we’ve already established that you won’t get an outcome that will be any different than the day before.

If you want to Innovate, don’t try what you’ve tried before – don’t do what you’ve done before – do something different. Cook yourself a real meal. You may think that it’s just as awful as that frozen dinner the first time (or maybe even worse) but you’ll learn and next time it will be better. Gradually you will learn to cook and that frozen dinner won’t be appealing anymore. Then you can cook something that you don’t find in the frozen dinner section, something new.

You just learned to Innovate and created *real* value at the same time. Well done.